My PC was quite cranky this morning, having trouble accessing the hard drive to write and hanging up at several different points. I recently decided it needed replacing before I managed to clear all these things up, so I'm hopeful about finding a root cause of all this and putting the problems behind me, but there's only so long I can be patient if these issues persist. Grrrr.

Hard drives are very reliable these days. I really can't remember the last time I had an HD failure. I had a scare about a year ago when my HTPC blue screened and the system log had several errors about bad sectors when it restarted and performed an auto disk check.

Being a 2TB drive full of recorded TV shows and not having enough spare HD space to back it all up, I was very worried. I manually did a full scan with WD's diagnostic software and it said the drive was fine. I did a full scan with Windows 7's chkdsk, and it passed and unmarked the sectors as bad. It has been running fine since.

I still do regular backups (every 2-3 days) of important things on my main system. I have an eSATA dock and a 1TB drive which I use for backing up files. I also have a 1TB USB drive that I backup to as well and keep in a fire-proof safe. When I go out of town I take the USB drive with me just so both of my backups aren't in the same place. I use TrueCrypt to encrypt it so if it gets lost or stolen, no one can get my stuff.